Body language

[Chad Douglas Nilep]

Kenneth Hyde wrote:

>This seems to be rather worryingly Whorfian.  If by "theorize," you mean "talk about" or "write about," then I can accept your point.  However, if you mean "conceptualize" or "think about," then I would have to demur.  I'm not persuaded that language has a deterministic effect on our thinking.

Hm, it worries me that you use the phrase "worryingly Whorfian". OK, I'm not really worried; I just note that my theoretical positions (prejudices?) seem at odds with yours. Certainly I take the point about determinism - thoughts do exist without direct expression in language - but I think many "Whorfian" notions have merit. At a minimum, there seem to be relationships between habitual patterns of speech and habitual patterns of thought, though I won't go too far arguing about causality.

I like Hyde's model of conceptual space with a masculine - feminine axis, among other axes. I would like to envision an empirical use of it. As Sheldon, Hyde, and others have suggested, the position of actual behaviors along an idealized masculine - feminine axis will differ from setting to setting (or "community" if you will). It may be useful, then, to perform some analysis along the lines of a microethnography (see Goodwin & Goodwin or J. Streeck) to determine which behaviors are positioned nearer to which end of the axis. Behavior (including speech) specifically labeled masculine could be placed nearer that end of the theoretical axis, and vice-versa. Behaviors not labeled, or labeled inconsistently, would be nearer the center.

An obvious drawback of such an empirical program, though, may be the lack of consistency in labeling behaviors, even by a single subject. Didn't Ochs (and probably many others) point to instances of the same behavior being labeled feminine when it was seen practiced by a woman, and masculine when practiced by man? I'm afraid the actual paper isn't coming to mind.

As with any coding scheme, eventually the analyst's own prejudices would seem to come into it. Of course as researchers its largely our job to be aware of our prejudices, since we can't truly escape them.

Chad D. Nilep
Linguistics
University of Colorado at Boulder
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~nilep